In spite of Purdie’s efforts, the trend was toward a competitive press. A rival _Virginia Gazette_ was set up in Williamsburg in 1766 by William Rind, a Maryland printer who was more sympathetic to the protesting colonists than Royle and Purdie were thought to be. The motto of his paper cannily proclaimed “Open to all Parties but influenced by None.” Governor Francis Fauquier at this time reported to the British Board of Trade: “The late printer to the Colony [Royle] is dead, and as the press was then thought to be too complaisant to me, some of the hot Burgesses invited a printer [Rind] from Maryland. Upon which the foreman [Purdie] to the late printer, who is also a candidate for the place, has taken up the newspaper again in order to make interest with the Burgesses.” Jefferson, who in 1766 was completing his study of law, and was a friend and admirer of Fauquier’s, recalled later: “We had but one press, and that having the whole business of the government, and no competitor for public favor, nothing disagreeable to the governor could be got into it. We procured Rind to come from Maryland to publish a free paper.” The hot-spirited Rind was elected public printer by the House of Burgesses. However, the job being too much for one printer alone, the Assembly in 1769 authorized both _Gazette_ publishers, Rind and Purdie, to print a large volume containing the Acts of Assembly then in force. Rind continued in office until his death in 1773 when his widow, Clementina Rind, took over the business as Virginia’s first woman printer. The number of weekly newspapers in Williamsburg increased again in 1775 when Purdie, who had taken John Dixon into his business nine years before, withdrew in favor of William Hunter, Jr., the son of William Parks’s successor, and established his own _Virginia Gazette_. When the Revolution broke in 1776, Williamsburg thus had three newspapers, each called the _Virginia Gazette_. Rind’s _Gazette_ expired by 1777, after a succession of managers, and Purdie’s (which was continued after his death in 1779 by Clarkson and Davis) ceased publication in 1780. Dixon formed a new partnership with Thomas Nicolson in 1779 after William Hunter, Jr., had joined the British forces. Their newspaper was called the _Phoenix Gazette and Williamsburg Intelligencer_, but it expired the following year when these printers followed the seat of government to establish Richmond’s first press.